Speed ​​monitoring Section Control Section control

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Speed ​​monitoring Section Control Section control
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Speed ​​monitoring Section Control Section control

Speed ​​monitoring – Section Control – Section control
Lack of legal basis and data protection?

Does section control threaten a new dimension in speed monitoring? Privacy advocates watch them with skepticism.

Brigitte Haschek

December 18, 2014

Some celebrate it as a gain for road safety, others fear it will sell out civil rights. We are talking about so-called section control, which could represent a new dimension in monitoring for motorcyclists and motorists. The section control is based on the simple principle of distance-time calculation: The vehicles are recorded at the beginning and at the end of the monitored route in order to determine the average speed. On the basis of the time that has elapsed when passing, it can be concluded whether the speed limit was observed or not.

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Can this method even be reconciled with the law anchored in Germany on data economy? Michael Brenner, who teaches German and European constitutional and administrative law at the University of Jena, is skeptical new method of traffic monitoring that has existed for years in the Netherlands and Austria. From spring 2015, it will now be used on a trial basis in Lower Saxony on the B 6 south of Hanover between Gleidingen and Laatzen for a year and a half.

Fundamental review of data security is still pending

The approximately three-kilometer stretch of the road is considered the main accident site. A system from the Dutch manufacturer Gatso is expected to be installed there. The sticking points in the section control are still the lack of a legal basis in Germany and data protection. Lower Saxony’s interior minister Boris Pistorius asserted at the presentation of the pilot test at the beginning of September that the state data protection officer had given the green light for the project. But that’s only half the story: Although the temporary trial run has been approved, a fundamental check of the data security is still pending.

“We have been waiting for the detailed technical documents for the device from Gatso for weeks,” says Lower Saxony’s data protection officer, Joachim Wahlbrink. “Without it, we cannot assess whether unauthorized reading of the data is impossible, how secure the encryption of the radio transmission and the temporarily stored information is, and whether there is absolutely residue-free deletion,” said Wahlbrink, describing the situation in mid-November.

Every driver is treated as a potential traffic offender

To make matters worse, every driver is initially treated as a potential traffic offender in the section control. “Conventional speed controls are always spot checks, but with the new route radar, all road users are placed under suspicion without a cause,” says traffic lawyer Daniela Mielchen. Due to the new technical possibilities, more and more data about the individual driver would be collected. “We have to be very careful with that,” warns Mielchen. It is particularly worrying that the section control also includes innocent people. “Everyday life shows that data is constantly being misused – even illegally,” says the lawyer.

The debate about the risks and side effects of section control is not new. Five years ago, the then federal data protection officer, Peter Schaar, expressed considerable doubts about the legal admissibility of the procedure in Germany. The storage of driver and vehicle-related information is a clear interference with the right to informational self-determination. Admittedly, that is a cumbersome term. But the translation that the highest constitutional guardians in Karlsruhe found for it is astonishingly simple: the citizens could “arouse the feeling of being monitored” and “general intimidation effects”, according to the judges at the Federal Constitutional Court. You really can’t accept that.

Identification of motorcyclists is no problem

A radar sensor and a camera specially developed for traffic monitoring are used for vehicle detection in each lane. When entering the monitored section, each rear of the vehicle is recorded and saved individually. This is repeated at the exit: the rear of the vehicle is recorded, marked with an exit time stamp and transmitted to the central system control. If the determined average speed results in a speed violation, the front camera is triggered. According to the manufacturer, a vehicle-specific pixel cloud is created and encrypted from each rear view using reading software. Access to the recordings is only possible when the speed limit is exceeded. Unlawful attempts to access the entrance and exit cameras and the system control lead to the deletion of all temporarily stored data.

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